The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Super Dickmann]

It is a fantasy game. Why is it OK for Diablo to be dark AF, but it is a problem when wow sometimes does it nowadays, eventhough they've always done it?

I haven't played it myself (yet), but what I've heard and watched videos on re: Diablo IV's tone is one of the generally encouraging signs I've seen from Blizzard in that regard, especially in contrast to D3 and SC2 having variations on the softening WoW tone. Even softer in SC2's case.

[Abraxan]

Any other hints at 10.2/beyond show up in datamining yet besides emerald dream and the fact that there's probably a cinematic at the end of the 10.1.5 dungeon?

[Super Dickmann]

Any other hints at 10.2/beyond show up in datamining yet besides emerald dream and the fact that there's probably a cinematic at the end of the 10.1.5 dungeon?

The book tie-in means it's fairly likely it's also Vyranoth swapping sides.

[micwini]

Any other hints at 10.2/beyond show up in datamining yet besides emerald dream and the fact that there's probably a cinematic at the end of the 10.1.5 dungeon?

Not really. And since D4 is out and 10.1 is well on its way, I'm curious when people think 10.1.5 is coming out. I'd say somewhere around 18/19 july?

[ImTheMizAwesome]

Not really. And since D4 is out and 10.1 is well on its way, I'm curious when people think 10.1.5 is coming out. I'd say somewhere around 18/19 july?

I think 1 season for diablo 4 starts mid to late july, so i wonder when they will release 10.1.5, i don't think they will release both at similar dates.

[Skildar]

The least intrusive change would be to let you reroll the quest, but as it's a side quest for optional loot it's not really a major issue. In general it's a slippery slope in terms of how objectionable something has to be relative to how mandatory it is for progress. I remember back in Wrath the whole drama about the Kirin Tor torture quest, which was unavoidable if you wanted to proceed with the story.

The whole bit you bring up in your follow-up post re: How everyone has to 'overcome' their legacy leads into it. Much like how the Kyrian adjustment made them more boring, a change wherein we help Alex or adjust things on her behalf or find a cop out for Amber diminishes the point the quest is going for and waters down the vibe we're told. There's a reason that the Infinite Flight dungeons, with the exception of Durnholde, are about preventing things that are objectionable - killing Medivh, stopping Arthas at Stratholme, etc. The mentality of the Flight is implicitly a lot better communicated when it's communicated how your day job doesn't just involve fixing minor hiccups in Jaina's upbringing but not only standing by but assisting in vile events taking place because they already happened and it isn't your purview to decide.

Yeah my view on Chromie's quest was wrong, I didn't check if it was part of the story or a truly optional quest. That's the thing though with video game media they want to give you freedom in openworld then put you in the chair of the rollercoaster ride. They want you to be the adventurer then the champion then the chosen one and we're back to explorer but are ask to do the bidding no one else can do and that includes genocide and making sure history happens as it had thefore you need to ensure rape and slavery do happen.

It's completely ok for me when I'm playing the game but I understand that some animal crossing type of players just want their character view to remain about cataloguing despite killing everything thayt moves in order to raise reputation to max level...

I just wish the impact of social media would be dialled down. WoW never had an impressive narrative, but lately it's going down to shit. In lack of true clarity on the subject I'm forced to blame social media shitstorms and bashing. I'm blaming them so that next expansions and patches do better than having a flashback Tyr questline that ends like a disney channel episode where every npc gives you its own version of "it's okay to be different and loving, being bad should never be the answer and there is always time to change"...

[Scyth]

Not really. And since D4 is out and 10.1 is well on its way, I'm curious when people think 10.1.5 is coming out. I'd say somewhere around 18/19 july?

I thought it'd be end of June but there's no indication of release yet so my next guess is mid-July as well.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

No, that's a completely different vibe. The whole point of a quest like this and why it and the Amber quest being next to quests where you help give Misha to Rexxar and so forth is, likely unintentionally, a very inspired way to sell what defending the timeline actually implies. It wouldn't just involve ensuring things don't get worse, it's just as much making sure things don't go better.

The amber Rexxar and all the past cavern quest already do that well enough, there is no need to make the player complicate in Alex’s imprisonment and rape. especially Not from a company that was recently outed for doing this exact thing in real life around Sexual assault and harassment.

If they want to address it at all it should be about making sure she gets out and then they could add dialog about what she went through and how she deals with it, other wise theses goons shouldn’t be touching the subject.

[Foreign Exchange Ztudent]

Any other hints at 10.2/beyond show up in datamining yet besides emerald dream and the fact that there's probably a cinematic at the end of the 10.1.5 dungeon?

As far as we can tell there's no real clue if 10.2 is the end or not. This book basically being supplementary to 10.2 like it was for 9.2 does make my eyebrow raise a bit.

The only things that point to 10.3 existing is the content schedule leaving a large gap before next Autumn-Winter 2024, the WoW Cast Ep1 having a mention of the Roadmap and it sounding like a positive and the fact that narratively we cannot really conclude in 10.2 unless the Rift of Aln consists of Galakrond and that's how they tie it all together and the zappy zap device is actually just used to corrupt Alexstrasza.

Basically, it will be until September - October (We still have 10.1.7 PTR) with either the Roadmap reveal itself or the 10.2 Interview Rounds having someone ask directly about 10.3s' existence to figure out anything.

[micwini]

I could see the expac having a 10.3 and even a 10.4 going well into 2024, just to give that little extra time for a world revamp expac late 2024

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I can't see past 10.3, personally but we'll see. I don't think everything is going to be resolved by 10.2. As for the Chromie quest, truthfully, they could of picked something else to help the Dragons maintain the timeline or just something else that doesn't put us in this weird ethical position.

[Super Dickmann]

The amber Rexxar and all the past cavern quest already do that well enough, there is no need to make the player complicate in Alex’s imprisonment and rape. especially Not from a company that was recently outed for doing this exact thing in real life around Sexual assault and harassment.

If they want to address it at all it should be about making sure she gets out and then they could add dialog about what she went through and how she deals with it, other wise theses goons shouldn’t be touching the subject.

No, 'need' doesn't factor into it the banality and bleakness of the subject matter communicate it in a way that the others quests don't and can't. That people in the company got into drama doesn't mean they should perpetually put these topics off limits at the expense of telling a more neutered story.

Though again, this debate is moot as it'll definitely be cut.

- - - Updated - - -

...I just wish the impact of social media would be dialled down. WoW never had an impressive narrative, but lately it's going down to shit. In lack of true clarity on the subject I'm forced to blame social media shitstorms and bashing. I'm blaming them so that next expansions and patches do better than having a flashback Tyr questline that ends like a disney channel episode where every npc gives you its own version of "it's okay to be different and loving, being bad should never be the answer and there is always time to change"...

It's always a gamble. As much as people complaining means you're spared the full Green Jesus story, the original Tyrande-Nathanos fight or the Sadfang saga without the loyalist option, it just as easily turns around and results in tarded changes, like the backtracking on Ysera and the inevitably chopping of this quest. Feedback is agnostic, it can be good or bad but the more vigorous it is when it comes to testier subject matter then the more averse the writers become to telling anything but a more banal plot, especially in their multi-million dollar main story.

We already saw this with BFA, where it wasn't the twee morality, hapless plotting, homogenization of the cast or the unraveling of the main crux of the franchise - the war between playable factions, that got the axe in future releases. All those things stuck around, what was removed were the surface parts which were entirely salvageable or even beneficial - faction focus, the heavy emphasis on war and conflict and the more dark subject matter, speared peasants, costs of war et al.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

No, 'need' doesn't factor into it the banality and bleakness of the subject matter communicate it in a way that the others quests don't and can't. That people in the company got into drama doesn't mean they should perpetually put these topics off limits at the expense of telling a more neutered story.

Though again, this debate is moot as it'll definitely be cut.

need factors into every single thing any dev puts in any game. They wanted to set a tone and that tone was already fulfilled without going to such distasteful ends.

if they want to touch oh they subject matter they should do it in a better way or not at all and yes any company with such a track record should put it off for ever if they don’t plan on doing it in a proper way.

[Murlocos]

I haven't played it myself (yet), but what I've heard and watched videos on re: Diablo IV's tone is one of the generally encouraging signs I've seen from Blizzard in that regard, especially in contrast to D3 and SC2 having variations on the softening WoW tone. Even softer in SC2's case.

Blizzard's core staff very publicly hit that transition period into their late 30s and early 40s of starting families and growing softer. Indirectly or directly quoted, there's been a lot of sentiment of "I want to design a game I can play with my kid" over the past couple years. Metzen's been very open about it, and frankly some of the Overwatch cinematics feel like they're targeted at five year olds writing-wise. Diablo IV had some outside writers involved, and while that's had its own set of controversies, the final product is definitely more tonally consistent with something like D2 than D3 was. I was worried about a certain character possibly existing as an out-of-place subversion of that tone, but they ended up not going down that road and I was pleased with the outcome.

I think the problem with WoW isn't handling dark subject matter or the lack thereof, it's that the increasingly character-focused nature of the story has coupled with writing that really set in with BfA that's put so much focus of the story on experiencing and overcoming trauma (IMO). The reason why the War of the Thorns is so controversial and something like the scourging of Lordaeron isn't is that there's been so much more focus on how absolutely horrific and pointless the former was compared to the latter. The Pamela Redpath storyline sells the tragedy of Lordaeron without being overbearing, Teldrassil and the effect it's had on people is still a focal point of the plot five real years later. Dragonflight is still touching on the same themes, it just risks the same problem but in the opposite direction of feeling overly saccharine. On one hand, you have frustrating story beats where everyone on-screen is just perpetually miserable, fatigued, hopeless, and then on the other hand you have frustrating story beats where everyone is so pleasant and on the same page as each other that the lack of tension is palpable.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with exploring those themes, I just don't think the writers are doing an adequate job of balancing it with the primary appeal of Warcraft.

[Super Dickmann]

need factors into every single thing any dev puts in any game. They wanted to set a tone and that tone was already fulfilled without going to such distasteful ends.

The distastefulness is the point of it. A softer depiction wouldn't be able to communicate it. Likely accidentally, they captured both why this would be a massively taxing position to take up, why most of them, including the leader, ultimately went Infinite. Alex's reaction at the end of the quest is more character than she's had in most everything else she's been in. All within a quest that takes sub-three minutes to complete and for all the whining has zero graphic content of any kind. If anything it's an instruction manual on how to handle this kind of thing in T-rated media.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

Though again, this debate is moot as it'll definitely be cut.

Yeah, from what i read people were contacting/taging devs and former wow devs on twitter.

How triggered someone can be over an optional quest in a video game, lol.

Like you said debate is moot because we all know what blizzard will do, just to be safe.

[Super Dickmann]

...There's absolutely nothing wrong with exploring those themes, I just don't think the writers are doing an adequate job of balancing it with the primary appeal of Warcraft.

You put it well enough that I don't really have mcuh to add besides agreeing, with the caveat that the tonal issue is also one of overlap. DF is for the most consistently soft, with its side content going a little bit serious in times and its character wtiing being marginally better. Even as someone firmly in the wheelhouse that it's the wrong route for the franchise at large, I've found the tone it has gone for to be fine for what it is.

The War of Thorns was, especially in those final couple pages of Elegy, relentlessly bleak in a way the game hasn't been even in things that are more graphic, like Vanilla Scholomance. But it's not in a story that's up for those themes, it's in a story that ultimately wants to tell you about how everyone should be friends and nothing really divides us. The whiplash of it is as bad as anything else.

There's also the swap in perspective, we were the perpetrator in the Scourging of Lordaeron, while the torching of the tree, besides being more poorly handled of course, had a portion of the playerbase in the role of the victim. This can work, we had the same pivot to the victim in going from being Arthas stomping over every named character and taking the piss out of them, to said wrecks picking themselves up in the MMO, it's the meat and potatoes of Sylvanas's story, but the War of Thorns lacks that aspect of control. That's a different line of thought though.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

The distastefulness is the point of it. A softer depiction wouldn't be able to communicate it.

killing allies like amber, helping purge strath, letting the orcs into Azeroth all communicate the awfulness of keeping the time line wonderfully, having a company that was complicate in SA/SH make you compliance in it in game should not be a thing.

[Super Dickmann]

killing allies like amber, helping purge strath, letting the orcs into Azeroth all communicate the awfulness of keeping the time line wonderfully, having a company that was complicate in SA/SH make you compliance in it in game should not be a thing.

Au contraire, if anything their experience with it makes them more qualified to deliver an authentic experience.

[ImTheMizAwesome]

So what's on the bingo card for edit:tomorrow* blue news?